Veteran Labour MP Austin Mitchell was elected MP for Great Grimsby in 1977 but will step down at the next election

The growing number of female MPs in the Labour party is making it too ‘gentle’ to wield power after the next election, a veteran MP has said.

Austin Mitchell, the Labour MP for Grimsby, said he was worried about the falling number of experienced men in the party because the party will be full of ‘amenable and leadable’ women obsessed with feminism.

Mr Mitchell, 79, who is stepping down at the next election, said Labour was becoming more ‘family-friendly, gentler’ but ‘less prepared for all-night shenanigans of the parliamentary kind’.

He also hit out at Labour’s so-called ‘red princes’ – who he dismissively referred to as ‘the scions of our great dynasties, the Kinnocks, the Straws, the Benns, the Blairs’.

He said they were the only ones allowed to bypass all-women shortlists.

Labour introduced all women shortlists in 1993 and has since seen a surge in the number of female Labour MPs - 81 out of 257.

The veteran MP said the party’s new ‘preoccupations’ will be ‘social, educational and family issues’ which have all been ‘brought to the fore by the feminisation of Labour through the obsession with All-Women’s Shortlists’,

Mr Mitchell said all-women shortlists were being imposed on regions such as Yorkshire and the North as a form of punishment ‘for their earlier male chauvinism’.

He said: ‘It cannot be denied that feminisation and youthification will make Parliament brighter, smarter and nicer.

‘Yet the Commons will also be more preoccupied with the local rather than the international (not necessarily a bad thing) and small problems rather than big ideas and issues (a very bad thing as it will be less exciting and lead to sixth-form essays read out word for cut-and-pasted word, replacing oratory).

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‘The Left will be even smaller but the party more manageable and reasonable, for apart from obsessive feminism, women MPs are more amenable and leadable and less objectionable. But it might not make us tougher.

‘If Labour wins in 2015, how a family-friendly, gentler party, less prepared for all-night shenanigans of the parliamentary kind, will face up to Tory hooligans who feel they’ve been unjustly deprived of a power that’s their due, is a more worrying matter.’

Mr Mitchell said the parliamentary party was undergoing ‘the biggest process of feminisation and rejuvenation embarked on since fabulous pink Camay soap promised to make us look a little lovelier each day’.

But he added: ‘Whatever the state of Labour’s policies for the next Election, there is little doubt that it will be fought by a younger, more attractive body of candidates.

The 79-year-old also said ageism was ‘rampant’ in Parliament.

He said the Lords was being used as a ‘marvellous political retirement home’. But he said: ‘Neither the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party] nor the Commons are good places for oldies with any ambition.’